You Say You Want a Revolution? Take it to the Tweet.
You probably spend almost your entire day on social networking sites. Facebook is the one you open first thing in the morning and check whenever you feel like picture-stalking, poking, or procrastinating. When you want the quickest gossip fix, blogs are the best place to go. Twitter is the trickiest and least intuitive of the bunch; even if you wrap your head around how it works, the answer to why you should try it seems elusive. Does the universe really need to know your every move?
In the aftermath of the 2009 Iranian election, hundreds of protestors took to the streets in violent demonstrations. As the Iranian government kicked journalists out of the country and rendered cell phones and websites casualties of combat, Twitter was the last means of communication left standing. In 140 character blasts, protestors in Iran could alert each other to danger zones and the locations of soldiers armed with machine guns. For Americans hungry for play-by-plays, the way to stay updated was one tweet at a time. Twitter, the same social networking site that lets Miley Cyrus share her deepest insights (“Coffee Bean cups make me happy :)”) proved to be the most effective means of on-the-ground communication in Iran.
Of course we could have found out about the scrambled-as-eggs election the traditional way—the alphabet soup of news channels (NBC, CBS, CNN, et. al.) and newspaper reports. Except, for those of you who’ve fallen behind on your “Mad Men”, the medium is the message. That Twitter was the medium of choice is news, in and of itself.
“Everything’s instant on Twitter, which makes rallying cries a lot easier to respond to, and the political efficacy demonstrated by our generation is due in large part to online social media,” says Julie Steinberg, current Bartley Fellow at the Wall Street Journal and contributor to Speakeasy, the Journal’s culture and entertainment blog. “Blogs, Twitter and Facebook are a thousand times better than the traditional model because they can reach more people faster.”
Twitter did for Iran what television did for Vietnam: transported a battle scene from a non-threatening far-away place to homes here in the U.S. It invaded our personal space. On top of that, Twitter kept tech-savvy Iranians in constant communication with one another when they needed contact the most. So even if you aren’t in the midst of riots surrounding an alleged electoral fraud, the take-home can still apply to you: social networks are an invaluable tool in the arsenal when you’re raising awareness for a cause.
How to Use Social Networking to Get Support For Your Cause
1. Take it seriously. It’s easy to blow off something like Twitter (goofy name) or Facebook (addictive, shallow) but these sites are in the lives of all the people you want to reach, on their laptops and phones, at their fingertips 24/7. Bring your message to where your audience is; don’t wait for them to find you.
2. Have a Twitter feed just for your cause, separate from your own personal one. You’ll generate more tweets that way (you can send messages to the cause page and vice versa) and look more legitimate.
3. There’s more than one way to be all over Facebook. Have a cause page, a group for easy mass-messaging, and events every few weeks. Just be careful about spamming everyone you know all the time, because they’ll stop reading if you message them 24/7.
4. Make short, focused videos and post them on YouTube. Make sure a link to your Facebook cause page is visible throughout the video; put it in a bar across the bottom or top of the screen. If someone wants to get involved, they’ll have access to more information instantly.
5. Start your own blog. It’s not just for Julia Child wannabes, Perez Hilton, and artsy narcissists anymore. The content management systems you can use to put the sites together are so user-friendly they’re almost condescending. Check out Blogspot.com and WordPress.com for the two simplest platforms to get you started.
Sources:
The Washington Post, Iran Elections: A Twitter Revolution?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2009/06/17/DI200… Julie Steinberg (Penn ’09), current Bartley Fellow at the Wall Street Journal and contributor to Speakeasy, the Journal’s culture and entertainment blog.